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SECURITAS MARE - CROWD AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT

Christer BERGQUIST Captain, Senior lecturer Assistant Professor Head of R & D and International Contacts Kalmar Maritime Academy Sweden Tel.: +46-480-49 76 13 Fax: +46-480-49 76 50 christer.bergquist@hik.se

ABSTRACT Shipping is by nature a genuinely international activity, with strict requirements for harmonized and equal training, regardless of where it is conducted. IMO:s model courses aims to give guidance in this respect. However, each signatory party to STCW-95 is free to set its own standards for the training. Around the world this has led to the unfortunate situation where there is not only variation in form, but also in content of the actual training that is being performed. Methods: The project Securitas Mare or “Safe Seas” was promoted through the EU: s Leonardo da Vinci program to address one aspect of this particular problem and aimed to create a common European standard for Crowd and Crisis Management training. The project had 15 partners, amongst them 10 MET institutions and the course concept thus created has today been accepted as an alternative standard in 6 of the participating countries. Presently a continuation has been started, in October 2006, to continue to spread the projects result through a so called Transfer of innovation-project. This so called transfer of innovation-project will be competed at November 30th this year and will be followed up with further various spreading and dissemination activities, already planned for the Far East and north and South America. Results: This presentation deals with the aims and results of the course and the project, describes the 15 project partners, the excellent results achieved as well as the projects future aims for specialized training also for shore side staff and other categories of seagoing personnel not covered by today’s requirements, as well as spreading the course concept to new countries, not originally targeted. The course concept developed was awarded recognition as “ The Best Training Course of the year” within the area of Safety at Sea at the SASMEX conference in April this year. Keywords: Harmonization, Training Requirements, Crisis Management 1. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND In the aftermath of the Estonia disaster, IMO decided that it was time to introduce a new type of training to the shipping community, namely the CROWD and CRISIS MANAGEMENT training. Over the years there has been a lot of talk about the human factor and how important it is to understand the same and take it into account when analyzing accidents and incidents of various natures, but little has been done to actually include training of the elements of the human factor within the curriculums of the academies. It is true of course that some steps has been taken to overcome these shortcomings, through the creation of BRM-courses, MRM -courses and similar, and at some academies also enlarge the courses covering leadership, teamwork and management. However, this new type of training requirement did, for the fist time, request a change of focus from training of technical issues towards understanding of human behaviors and human reactions, with a particular focus on behavior and reactions under stress and in critical situations. One of the main challenges for the industry and the traditional MET system (Maritime Education and Training) was to create courses meeting these requirements, with not much of competence available within the traditional academies, and not much of experience in creating these types of courses. With a long tradition of extensive traffic with ro-ro passenger ferries between the two countries, Sweden and Finland decided that it now was time to grasp this new opportunity and for the first time try to create a common curriculum for the new course, which was named CCM or Crowd and Crisis Management. A

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project group was set up including maritime academies in both countries as well as both shipping administrations, an external expert on crisis behaviour and reactions and finally a couple of passenger vessel operators, representing both countries formed a reference group. The course curriculum thus created has not only been used for courses in both countries ,but has also led to an exchange of students and lectures between the academies involved At a later stage, other academies also in Denmark, Norway and Estonia was invited to take part in the exchange and to arrange courses based on the same curriculum. This later cooperation was done within a Nordic Network project called “ TRYGGT HAV “ which is swedish for SAFE SEAS. 2. IDENTIFIED PROBLEM ARES – IMPORTANCE OF HARMONIZATION OF TRAINING Even though the IMO, as always, has produced a so called Model Course, for the CCM-courses, outlining the recommended contents of the course it is, as always, up to each individual administration to set their own requirements, based on the relevant part of the STCW - 95. This has led to the unfortunate situation where there is not only variation in form, but also in content of the actual training being performed. Within the European community course lengths between one day and five days can be found, all leading to the same type of certificate. Obviously the contents of these courses cannot be the same, but yet they are providing the course participants with the same type of document, accepted by the authority that has acknowledged the curriculums. Another area creating problems is that the STCW –95 convention not clearly identifies the positions towards which the training should be given, leading to a great variation in interpretation between the national authorities. The result has been that some flag states demands that all officers onboard should have gone trough the training whereas others flag states accepts that only one officer onboard needs to have passed the full course, giving him the competence to educate the rest of the staff on his own. It is also possible to find individual companies that have, on their own initiative, extended the training requirements to include the whole crew. The convention requires that all crew-members having a role in the evacuation process should have got a so called Crowd Management Course, generally given by company officers onboard the vessels for a maximum of one day. The STCW has further limited the requirements for CCM - training to officers and staff serving onbord passenger vessels and ro-ro passenger vessel, whereas the need for understanding of human behaviour and reactions must be considered to be identical, regardless of type of vessel an officer is serving onboard. It goes almost without saying that also office staff ashore, particularly those with duties within a companies emergency organization, could benefit from having a basic understanding of these issues. 3. THE SECURITAS MARE PROJECT - AIMS Since long there have been various projects within the European Maritime Educational Society, supported by the EU, which has had their aim to create common standards for maritime education and training. The largest of these projects being the MARMET, led by the WMU in Malmö, Sweden, where the goal has been to create common curriculums for a number of courses, leading to the Master Mariner and Chief Engineer degrees. The COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE COUNCIL AND THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT on the training and recruitment of seafarers, COM (2001) 188, 6.4.2001, clearly identifies the needs for a more harmonised approach, Quote, The first challenge for the MET: system is to provide quality seafarers capable of working on board high quality ships. To ensure this that this challenge is met at Community level, it would first be necessary for the training institutes to carefully analyze and where necessary, revise their teaching programmes. It is essential that teaching programmes meet the overall requirements of the shipping industry (familiarity with international legislation – particularly the provisions of the STCW95 Convention and the ISM Code – and with modern technology) and that they ensure a good knowledge of the English language. Equally important is closer alignment of the existing national MET systems, which could encourage useful cross-fertilization and result in an overall improvement in the Member States MET-systems. Unquote

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The SECURITAS MARE has addressed this particular problem and was aimed to create a common European standard for this type of training of seafarers as its main objective. With reference to the earlier mentioned communication from the Commission, Member States has been invited to give adequate priority to maritime training and to support maritime initiatives in the field of human recourses. The project SECURITAS MARES main objective clearly constitutes such an initiative. The projects secondary objective has been to establish a standard for the development of mandatory training courses for the shipping industry. There are a number of courses given at maritime academies and training institutions in all member states within the community, where the basic problem of course lengths and contents are more or less of the same nature as earlier described here. If the SECURITAS MARE project proved to be a success, the same method could also be used for harmonization of every other course where such a need has been identified. 4. PARTNERS – IMPORTANCE TO ALSO INCLUDE NEW EU MEMBER STATES Already the Nordic project TRYGGT HAV attracted interest from other institutions around Europe who had come across information about it, not only from the maritime world but also from other interested groups, having a need to formulate a training curriculum dealing with Crisis management, such as nurses, ambulance staff and fire brigades. This encouraged us to continue to develop an application to Brussels for the formation of a project dealing with specifically that. Being a Maritime Academy the goal was of course to present a course directed towards the needs of the maritime industry, but at the same time trying to arrange the curriculum in such a way that the main modules could be rearranged to suit also any other groups needs. When we first announced our intention to formulate the project to all parties that we thought would be interested, the respons was almost overwhelming and we found our self in the position to be able to carefully select the partners, keeping in mind the various interests that we wanted to promote. With the goal in mind to reach an EU-standard we also wanted to get a partnership reflecting as many seafaring nations as possible. We knew that a Leonardo da Vinci project would not be accepted in Brussels, if it only contained academies and training institutions, and since we ourselves had a need to also include administrations, labour unions and employers in the project to get as much support from all sectors of the industry as possible, we where able to include representatives from these sectors as well. Since the EU had accepted many new applicant states as members, with entry dates already set at the time of application, and since we knew that many of these states where educating a large number of seagoing staff, we felt it important to include also them in a project of this nature. We also knew that seafarers from a number of these new member states already where holding position onboard many EU-flagged vessels it further strengthened our will to be able to already from the beginning have at least one partner in the consortium representing one of these states. This particular aim has been further strengthened during the follow-up project which is a so called “ Transfer-of-innovation” project where new member states has been targeted. In order to find the most suitable academies to invite as partner, we made a thorough investigation into which maritime academy we believed would have the best chance to influence as many of the others as possible and found a partner that we felt would be just right for this purpose. The partnership thus formulated was the following, Kalmar Maritime Academy as project coordinator. Hochshule Bremen, representing the maritime education in Germany, with excellent contacts with a number of other branches in Germany interested in Crisis management training. Maritiem Instituut “Willem Barentsz “, representing maritime education in Holland. Universidad de Cadiz representing both maritime and health care education in Spain. Vestfold College in Norway, also representing both branches of education in Norway

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Sydväst Polytechnic, Turku Finland also representing both branches of education. University of Pireaus, dep. of maritime studies, giving us access to the whole cluster of Greek Shipping. Åland Maritime Institute, Mariehamn Finland, one of our original project partner Maritime Safety and Survival center, Reykjavik, Iceland, holding the position as chairman for the international organization of safety training centers and thus being able to have an influence within this sector.. IFSMA, International Federation of Ships Master Associations, filled the requirement to also include labour unions. VIKING LINE of Finland, became our partner representing employers We where also very glad to be able to include The Swedish Shipping Administration, as partner, thus meeting the request to have a governmental organization included in the partnership Högskolen Buskerud, Norway, educates nurses and others for different health care positions but is also primarily Norway’s leading center for Crisis management studies. And last but in no way least we found two partners from one of the member states, that where willing and able to also take on the role to spread our project results to the other new member states . Estonian Maritime Academy (Eesti Mereakadeemia) Tallinn and Tallinn Medical School (Tallinna Meditsiinikool) was included as partners, giving us the maximum recommended number of partners. We felt that we had been able to put together a very strong partnership and that we therefore should have a fair chance of success for the work to come 5. PROJECT PLAN The project was developed over a period of two and a half year and started in January 2003 and the end result was presented in a final report before the 1st of July 2005. It was divided into eight work packages and could be described by the following stages, A/ during the spring of 2003, demonstration courses exemplifying the “Nordic Concept”, where

given in Kalmar, Mariehamn and Turku. B/ spring and summer of 2003, a survey of existing course material, from all countries presently

giving this type of courses was performed. C/ during the autumn of 2003, workshops and seminars was conducted in Greece and Spain to

develop a “best practice” curriculum, to be used as a base for future work. At these seminars also representatives from the shipping industry, local authorities etc was invited to participate, thus spreading information about the project to a wider audience.

d/ In January 2004 a seminar was held onboard one of our partner VIKING LINES vessels

where the results so far was presented to all interested parties´, such as several national shipping authorities, passenger vessel owners and operators, representatives from the EU: s Maritime Safety Committee, other institutions and academies not being pertness of the project and international media..

e/ During the spring of 2004, a training course was conducted, where lecturers went through

the curriculum step-by –step to fully appreciate the teaching methods and contents, at a so called Teach-the-Teachers-course.

F/ From August onwards, a number of courses was held at all participating academies where

local shipping industry, authorities and others was invited to participate, all with good results

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and feed-back. At one of these courses held in Holland at the Willem Barentsz Institut Canadian students, from the CIMET project participated.

g/ In November a seminar was held in Tallinn, Estonia, where results was presented. This

seminar had a particular emphasis on inviting all our new EU members to also conduct this type of training for their seafarers, using the projects curriculum.

G/ The last stage represents spring of 2005, where further dissemination of results was

conducted, the result presented to IMO:s STW committe, EMSA and other EU bodies , with a closing seminar in Vestfold, Norway.

Evaluation of results and working practices was done constantly during the project and a decision weather the same model should be used also for harmonization of other mandatory training courses was taken by the partners at the end of the project and put forward as a suggestion to IMO. 6. PRESENT SITUATION Today the project has been completed, as already mentioned, with a very positive response from the participants. Some 200 representatives from the partners and the shipping industry have participated in the demonstration and student courses and have been through the dissemination process in their home countries. The two workshops where very successful and both gave us further possibilities to meet with a large number of representatives from various industry sectors who all gave us good support for the work done so far. In addition it could be worth mentioning that the number of “normal” course participants in the countries offering the course is today exceeding 1 000 persons. The project partners where all very much in favor of the idea that this way of arranging common course curriculums can be a model for the future, particularly if we really want to achieve a truly open and common labour market within the European Union. At the closing meeting the majority of the partners was in favor of a continuation of the project, by applying for a so called “Transfer of Innovation”- project through the Leonardo da Vinci program, with the ambition to spread the course concept further to other member countries within the EU and also to further strengthen the possibilities for an acceptance of this way of working with model courses. Ideally networks of these types should be formed with partnerships from all over the world, to better reflect also the cultural differences that may exist between ways of teaching in different parts of the world. This “Transfer of Innovation” project, suitably named SECURITAS MARE II, was granted funding from the EU during the early autumn of 2006, with the best evaluation reference ever given to a Swedish LdV-project, and held its “Kick-Off”- meeting in Kalmar in November that year. Until today this second project has held demonstration courses in the UK, Ireland, Latvia and Lithuania and is presently planning to do the same in Romania and Turkey. There have also been scheduled meetings with EU decision-makers in Brussels and with EMSA as well as seminars in several partner countries. The project has also been demonstrated twice at IMO during scheduled sessions of the STW-comittee. A strong reference group was also formed around the project. This group had participation from several Officers unions, shipping organisations such as Nordkompass, representing all passenger ferry operators within the Nordic countries, as well as some of the partner countries shipping administrations. Further to these parties directly involved, other interested parties representing higher education for police forces, fire brigades and medical faculties has become members. Some maritime consultants, navy training centers and ship yards has also expressed their interest to participate in the reference group, and all of these has of course also been invited to the workshops held during the later faces of the project, and many of them was also invited again to become members of the new reference group which was formed for the next step of the development. 7. CONCLUSIONS AND POSSIBLE FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS – Importance of emergency training for all categories of staff members and for all types of vessels. Going back to the Securitas Mare project again, there was of course also a number of problem areas to overcome and one of the more difficult problem that was facing the project was to get an acceptance by national authorities in the participating countries for this new course, that in most cases already had been given acceptance to courses with a somewhat different content.

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Within the project group we where perhaps to pessimistic about this aspect. What actually had happened, was that already at the end of project time, the course had gained acceptance in Sweden, Estonia , Finland and Iceland and was in the process of getting acceptance in Holland and Spain. The project has, as mentioned earlier, set the goal to become the first course accepted by EMSA and to get support by the same organisation. With this in mind both EMSA and the relevant national authorities was invited to participate in all seminars and courses that was planned to take place during the project period. Unfortunately EMSA, on an early stage declared that the educational side of safety was not something they wanted to prioritize and they have therefore declined to participate although they wanted to follow the results and asked to be kept informed. We expect to able to change this during the next face of the project. The requirement for this type of training is presently only directed towards key staff onboard passenger vessels and ro-ro passenger vessels. There is no doubt that there is a clear need for other persons onboard to also get the type of training that a course of this nature will provide them with. This is particularly true for personnel onboard vessel with very small crews, where each and every one will be heavily involved and engaged should an emergency situation ever occur. One could of course also argue that any officer onboard a vessel, being by rank and tradition in a position where he has a responsibility for other persons, would need some basic understanding of human reactions and crisis management. Regardless of what kind of vessel he or she will be serving on an officer with a clear responsibility to act and react during any type of crisis situation would benefit from having learnt more about human behaviour under stress and in difficult situations, as well as leadership and guidance under such circumstances. It as a clear shortcoming of our present educational system that these skills have not yet become mandatory for all officers and also for all officer to be, i.e. the students at maritime academies. Another of the projects secondary goals is therefore also to give suggestions for how this could be achieved. The persons ashore, belonging to a company’s emergency team will also need to be trained, There is today no formal requirement for these persons to go through training for emergency situations, even though some countries and certain charterers has put up their own requirements. Some companies has, on their own initiative let persons from the emergency teams go through CCM-courses together with their seagoing staff, initiatives that has got a strong positive response from the course participants. With very small alterations the CCM-courses could also be given in a specialized form to such emergency teams, allowing them to get a more thorough understanding of how they could better assist and support their vessels in an emergency. It may be time now to also put formal requirements for training also for the persons working ashore in a shipping companies organization, as it has been for the seafaring staff for many years. One must of course also mention the secondary objective of the project, which was to create a standard form for creation of mandatory training courses for the maritime industry. If we, the partners of the project, will be able to succeed with our main objective, we believe that we already by doing so, has set an example that would be worthwhile following also for all other types of training courses for our seagoing staff. This particular aspect will be emphasized to the IMO:s STW committee during their next session, since we in the project group believe that the success of the project speaks for itself in this respect. It goes without saying that one of projects further aims is to create a new standard for this type of training which could be incorporated all around the world. Since it has been difficult to convince the IMO to change their existing standards, already adopted many years ago, and accepted by member states. We have used another way of getting the course content and pedagogy accepted as an alternative standard by going to individual administrations, as previously explained , and as another alternative way getting the course adopted by DNV and thus recognized as a course allowed and recommended to be given at all institutions having DNV as their accredited QA-body. By doing this the project has attracted interest from a number of MET institutions around the world in Canada, the US, Singapore, Australia and perhaps now also from the Philippines.

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For anyone who would like to know more about the project SECURITAS MARE and its continuation, SECURITAS MARE II, I have brought with me some brochures and I also invite you all to visit the projects own home page, http://securitasmare.sjofartshogskolan.nu